...of electric fans

Today is officially the warmest day we’ve experienced this spring.

In my work place the heaters are being put away and the fans are coming out.

Hmmmm fans...

Several years back the company that employs me bought a shipping container to use as a radio resistant chamber. I shan’t bore you with the details, suffice to say after minor modifications we set this behemoth down in a far corner of our workshop and set up an emission measuring laboratory within it.

In order for the chamber to be completely free of any type of radio emissions we decided a refrigerated container would be best because internally they are completely lined with stainless steel. This combined with the outer steel casing provided us with a large room that was immune from even the most powerful of radio transmissions and rendered all cell phones useless if taken within it.

As you may or may not have noticed, refrigerated shipping containers come complete with their very own chiller units (rather like air conditioning units on steroids). The ones fitted to our container needed to be removed before we could put it into use as they allowed openings in the chamber walls that let radio signals in.

We stripped these chillers off and they lay about the shop for sometime before myself and our German design engineer took an interest in them.

The motors were large and completely waterproof and had fitted to them rather large (500mm) extremely dangerous looking, stainless steel fans.

It didn’t take us too long to figure out how to make them run and we were astonished at the absolutely phenomenal amount of air they could shift. They were immediately banned from the work place as the fan blades were completely un-guarded and spun at a ferocious leg chopping 4000rpm! If you cant imagine why 4000rpm of spinning steel is so dangerous try tipping your lawn mower on its side, jamming the throttle at full and grabbing the spinning blade – and it’s doing nowhere near 4000rpm.

I kid you not, the wind coming off these things would have a woman’s skirt off at 50 metres and being that I lived in a small, extremely hot and poorly ventilated house I figured one of these bad boys would be just the ticket at home where Occupational Health and Safety had no jurisdiction.

I clearly remember the day I took it home – I was ever so eager to show my overheated and sweltering flat mates and it would be hard to imagine a better day for a demonstration of my newly acquired ‘mega fan’, it was scorching!

I decided that it would be safest to situate the beast in a corner of the lounge so that nobody could approach it from behind and accidentally lose a leg or foot to the fan blades. It seemed obvious that nobody would be unaware of it when approaching from the front because the wind coming from the bastard nearly took you off your feet!

- Once when I was a small boy my friend and I were throwing sand balls at each other at the beach. Unsatisfied with the impact my sand balls were having on my friends head I decided I could have a much more telling effect if I simply put a big rock inside one.

The minute I threw that sand ball, the instant it left my hand, I wished I could have it back...

..and so it was as I flicked the mains switch on at the wall.

It’s hard to describe the order of catastrophic events that occurred given the degree of chaos that ensued the moment that switch was thrown.

It became obvious to me immediately that running these fans in an extremely large warehouse as opposed to a very small lounge room was an entirely different kettle of fish!

It seemed that in an instant, every ash tray in the room (‘there were many and they were all full’) emptied themselves into the available air space within the room, and I don’t just mean the ash, no - butts and all were being swirled around the room. The dogs howled and made a desperate bid for freedom adding further to the furor by knocking several housemates to the floor.

In the next few moments, while we were all temporarily distracted by the cigarette butts and ash in our eyes, the window drapes, conveniently bunched in the corner behind the monster fan were then drawn into the back of the ghastly monstrosity. The drapes were doomed from the moment the very tip of one touched the fan blade.

Being that the motor itself was very heavy and powerful meant the unfortunate drapes simply wrapped around the fan and motor shaft without unsettling or slowing the fan in the least! And so with a horrendous tearing noise the drapes, mesh curtains and curtain rails were torn from the wall and attempted to wrap themselves around the cursed fan. At this point there was so much shredded curtaining and pieces of curtain rod trying to spin around the fan that the fan had become larger than the motor that spun it and it crashed sideways to the floor and began galloping in frighteningly random circles around the lounge floor space smashing tables and tearing furniture into large chunks!

We fled.

Honestly, I was frightened.

My housemates on the other hand, were livid!

Thankfully the trashing ended reasonably quickly (albeit dramatically) in a burst of sparks when the fan managed to cut through the lead from the motor to the wall.

I was permitted to stay – but sadly my fan was banned (I was certain that with a little more experimentation it could be tamed, but my suggestion was not met with a great deal of enthusiasm).

I gave it to a friend who works as a car painter; he uses it to extract paint vapors from his garage and to this day nobody has suffered any injury,

yet...

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